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Highway 7: Living on the edge in a rare rural stretch of seven

Small, static communities pay high price for the quiet life.

Leslie Fisher's parents opened the Paddock Garage and gas bar on Highway 7 in Pickering's Greenwood community in 1958. Fisher still runs the business today. (Amy Dempsey / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

Highway 7 is changing. When the road was designated a provincial highway in the 1920s, it was a gateway for city dwellers. For the next nine decades, the road grew with Ontario, from its rural routes to industrial highway. Now, with major investment in public transit, Highway 7 is becoming an urban thoroughfare.

The Star brings you seven tales of the people and places that are a part of the highway’s story. This is Part 2.

Along this strip of seven, roughly from Locust Hill to the western edge of Brooklin, sit rolling farmlands and a string of sleepy communities. It’s a pleasant pause from the big-name chains and condo developments that now line the road on much of this old highway. This is where urban meets rural, where city meets country, and in some ways, where present meets past.

“At one time, these were well-travelled roads,” says Leslie Fisher, a mechanic and father of three who runs the Paddock Garage, one of the few remaining establishments along this part of Highway 7.

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The Paddock is an auto repair shop, gas bar and convenience store that sits on a rectangular slice of land along the north side of the road in Greenwood, a hamlet in north Pickering. It is the last remaining business of its kind in an area that had 7 or 8 pumps in its heyday.

“It’s called Paddock Garage because there’s a horse paddock behind us,” explains Fisher, 55. Sitting in his shop on a weekday afternoon, he wears a button-up plaid sweater. His hands and shirt are stained with grease.

Fisher’s family has owned this place since 1958, when his parents, Gerald and Rita, bought the land from a local farmer. In its early days, the Paddock was a mom-and-pop shop, with a diner where Rita served up homemade pies and fresh-cut French fries to locals and travellers.

Fisher has been working at the Paddock since he was 12, first pumping gas, then later as an apprentice mechanic with his dad. The original shop burnt to the ground in 1970 when a fuel tank caught fire, but Gerald rebuilt it the next year. The Paddock still retains its original ranch-style rustic charm.

Back then, when Highway 7 was a major east-west roadway, these were busy parts. Not so much anymore. The few small businesses left on this 20-km stretch of rural road include a hot tub store, an RV lot, an antique shop, an art gallery and a place that rents portable toilets.

“Over the years, (it changed from) being a road that had communities along it with gas stations and restaurants and all those kind of things,” Fisher says. “Now it’s primarily just a road because most of that stuff’s disappeared.”

Why has the stuff disappeared? Well, for one thing, there are bigger, faster highways to travel on nowadays. Those who do come through Highway 7 are generally diverting from the 407 in an effort to move swiftly — and without being tolled — from one place to another.

But one of the biggest reasons stems all the way back to 1972, when the federal government expropriated 7,500 hectares of agricultural land and more than 700 homes from locals for a proposed future airport that residents have been protesting ever since. A lot of folks moved away as a result and the area has languished.

Ironically, however, the battle over the proposed airport — still ongoing after 40 years — has actually protected the area from what many residents would consider undesirable development.

“Like urban sprawl,” says area councillor Peter Rodrigues, his words laced with disgust. Rodrigues, who was elected to Pickering council in 2010, has been a local resident for 10 years. “It’s been kind of a backhanded mixed blessing,” he says of the proposed airport.

Further east along this rural part of seven, the 2005 Greenbelt Act — an effort to restrain urban sprawl — prevents development from happening in communities like Greenwood.

“Having a piece of property that is unmolested as a relief from that development is not a bad thing, I don’t think,” says Dennis Mann, 70, who has lived in a house alongside Highway 7 in Brougham for a quarter century. Mann says it would be a shame if they were to lose more rural space. “I mean, we do not need anymore congestion.”

Though many locals champion the lack of sprawl, the alternative — rural slump? — is not without consequences. Farmers and business people struggle to make a living around here. Lately the lull has been compounded by the widening of Highway 7 to accommodate commuter traffic, unpleasant road construction that has been dragging on for nearly two years.

More change is coming. A planned extension of the 407 from where it currently ends at Brock Rd. in Pickering to Oshawa is scheduled to open in late 2015. The new stretch of highway will undoubtedly change the flow of traffic along the seven, for better or for worse.

And then there’s the planned Seaton development, which is set to bring an estimated 61,000 people and 30,500 jobs to the area south of Highway 7 and west of Brock Rd. The plan will shorten the stretch of rural highway that currently exists and have an untold impact on the surrounding area.

In Greenwood, however, where most of the land north and south of Highway 7 is Greenbelt protected, the quiet little hamlet will likely remain quiet, for now at least.

These days at the Paddock, Fisher runs the auto repair shop himself and leases out the gas bar and convenience store.

“In a business like this, your customers become your friends, too. Like the guy who owns that car right there’s my lawyer,” he says, nodding at a canary yellow 1967 Saab. “It’s a country atmosphere where you drop the vehicle off and I give you a ride home.”

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